As surprising as this might be, usually socioeconomically disadvantaged groups have lower life expectancy. Why? They've visited the doctor less (and when they did visit, were at poorer health care facilites), eaten worse diets (since healthy food is more expensive than crap food in our country), lived in worse housing and neighborhoods, had more psychological stress, worked in more dangerous jobs, and lived near more hazardous waste sites, to name a few possible reasons. On top of this, studies done by the National Academy of Sciences found that minorities face discrimination by health care providers and more generally receive lower quality health care, even when controlling for age, income, insurance status, and severity of health condition.
The black-white disparities in health have always existed in America, even back in the 19th century when little doctors did actually helped medically. Essentially, everyone has been getting healthier, but the gap has never closed.
An interesting fact: in countries with large disparities in SES, both rich and poor people have lower life expectancy than people in countries with less inequality. In countries like the US (where the gap between the rich and the poor is rather large), even the richest people suffer a lower life expectancy than people in less stratified societies (ie several European countries).
On particular questions: the American Indian reservations in South Dakota are some of the poorest and most disadvantaged areas of the country, hence the ridiculously low life expectancy. (American Indian reservations in general are horrible places to live, look for a post on that sometime soon). Also, differences in infant mortality rates are also due to the things I discussed above.
2 comments:
As an anthropology major at UT, I studied numerous peoples of the American West. Besides poverty, one of the biggest problems is alcoholism. Alcohol is metabolized differently by people of different ethnicities (think about all those Russians drinking all that vodka and living into their nineties) and the Native American population does not metabolize it very well at all. The percentage of alcoholics on reservations is staggering, as is the percentage of absent fathers, and dyslexia. Reservations are hellish. I miss you so much Val!
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